At Paris Show, Chalayan’s Fantastical Creations

11:50 a.m. | Updated The post has been updated to reflect new information about the exhibit, which has been extended to Dec. 11.

A wearable, paper-like dress that one could fold and airmail; a coffee table transformed into a wooden skirt; dresses inlaid with more than 15,000 colorful LEDs; a fiberglass dress that changes shape by remote control. These fashion creations may have once seemed fantastical, but are in fact realities, thanks to Hussein Chalayan.

Paris

These items by Mr. Chalayan, the progressive London-based designer best known for flouting the industry’s artistic paradigms, and more are now showing at “Hussein Chalayan: Fashion Narratives,” running to Dec. 11 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (107, rue de Rivoli, 75001; 33-1-44-55-57-50; www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr) in Paris.

“A lot of people look at my work as these spectacles, but the clothes themselves actually take most of our time,” Mr. Chalayan said. “You’ll see there’s a lot of experimentation in the way things are done and things are cut, most of our time is spent on this.”

The show aims to present the narratives — largely influenced by the designer’s British-Turkish Cypriot background — which he has translated from stories to allegorical women’s wear over the last 16 years. In 2002, his “Ambimorphus” collection presented increasingly Western variations on a traditional Turkish dress; the 2009 “Earthbound” collection reversed that, portraying the London cityscape and its influences from the world around.

Pamela Golbin, the exhibit’s curator, has brought clothing, installations, projections and research together to showcase the narratives, which are galvanized as much by global political, economic and societal discord as by technology and abstract themes like movement and displacement, migration and speed, time and space.

“Hussein separates his artistic process from the final product, meaning the dress,” Ms. Golbin said. “So although he did choose fashion as the industry to express himself in, he really dissociates art from commerce.”